TY - BOOK ID - 17509851 TI - Our politics, our selves? PY - 1995 SN - 0691037167 9786612752254 1400821711 1282752251 1400811406 9780691037165 9781400811403 9781282752252 6612752254 9781400821716 PB - Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press DB - UniCat KW - Identiteit (Psychologie) KW - Identity (Psychology) KW - Identité (Psychologie) KW - Liberalism KW - Liberalisme KW - Libéralisme KW - Personal identity KW - Self KW - Soi KW - Soi (Psychanalyse) KW - Soi (Psychologie) KW - Zelf KW - Consciousness KW - Individuality KW - Mind and body KW - Personality KW - Thought and thinking KW - Will KW - Liberal egalitarianism KW - Liberty KW - Political science KW - Social sciences KW - Ego (Psychology) KW - Liberalism. KW - Self. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:17509851 AB - Is statecraft soulcraft? Should we look to our souls and selves in assessing the quality of our politics? Is it the business of politics to cultivate, shape, or structure our internal lives? Summarizing and answering the major theoretical positions on these issues, Peter Digeser formulates a qualified permission to protect or encourage particular forms of human identity. Public discourse on politics should not preclude talk about the role of reason in our souls or the importance of wholeness and community to our selves or the significance of autonomy for individuals. However, those who seek to place only their own conception of the self or soul within the reach of politics are as mistaken as those who would completely preclude such matters from the political realm. In proposing this view, Digeser responds to communitarians, classical political rationalists, and genealogists who argue that liberal culture fragments, debases, or normalizes our selves. He also critically analyzes perfectionist liberals who justify liberalism by virtue of its ability to cultivate autonomy and authenticity, as well as liberal neutralists who wish to avoid altogether the problem of selfcraft. All these, he argues, fall short in some way in defining the extent to which politics should be concerned with the self. ER -